Vb.net Newbie Asks . . .

About connections to a database--- My organization hates wizards and black box code. They want to avoid using the data access components because they fear debugging nightmares (back in VB 6 those wizard controls used to create extra connections to the database which crashed us several times).

In VB 6, you could put a public connection in a module and call it from wherever, thus no wizards or pesky microsoft logic to deal with. Is there an equivilent method in VB.NET? Thanks in advance to anyone who can offer knowledge or advice!